Condiments: Dips

People have been dipping food into sauces for millennia, but the commercial category of dips can be traced to the 1950s, when Lipton began a promotional campaign to combine their French onion soup mix with sour cream or cream cheese as dips for potato and corn chips. Since then, hundreds of commercial dips have been manufactured; by far, salsa has been the most important. While it had been made in America since the early nineteenth century, its use exploded during the 1980s and continued to increase during the following decade. By the mid-1990s salsa outsold ketchup. Although it slipped subsequently in its ratings, salsa remained as one of America’s most important condiments throughout the first decade of the twenty-first century.